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Twitter shuts down after cyber attack

Some 17 million Web users found they could not access the popular micro-blogging website Twitter after a cyber attack forced a temporary shutdown of the service.

AFP - The wildly popular micro-blogging site Twitter went offline Thursday after a malicious cyber-attack on its systems, the company said.

Twitter was down for more than two hours before engineers at the California firm were able to get it back online with a warning at the website that "we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack."

"On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack," Twitter executive Biz Stone said in an official company blog.

"Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users," he said.